Cloud Service Brokers: An Emerging Trend in Cloud ... - IEEE Xplore

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Cloud Service Brokers. An emerging trend in cloud adoption and migration. Bimlesh Wadhwa. Dept. of Computer Science. School of Computing, NUS.
2013 20th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference

Cloud Service Brokers An emerging trend in cloud adoption and migration Bimlesh Wadhwa Dept. of Computer Science School of Computing, NUS Singapore [email protected]

Abstract—With the advent of cloud, a large number of cloud providers have surfaced in the market. Cloud Consumers are rapidly using cloud services(IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) to meet their business needs while cloud providers are rapidly developing much needed tools and environments. This rapid growth however is creating a significant need to develop fast and controlled mechanisms for managing costs, capacity and resources at agreed service levels in order to have a smooth adoption, management and maintenance of cloud for both consumers and providers. Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs), an intermediary between the consumer and providers, emerges as a solution to address above need. In this paper we focus on reviewing the significance, role and services of a CSB, followed by a categorization of CSBs on the basis of the services they provide, and a method to select a CSB from a pool of CSBs.

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INTRODUCTION

The concept of cloud has finally emerged as a popular concept from its nascent stages. Cloud currently represents 8% of office systems and 50 million users worldwide, excluding India and China [24]. Gartner suggests that by 2017, cloud shall account for a third (33%) of office systems. This figure should reach to something as high as 60% by 2022 [24]. “Cloud services won’t reach their full potential until we can automate how we buy and sell them”, says Peter Judge [25].In this context, Cloud Services Brokerages(CSBs) have emerged as a solution. These CSBs provide services encompassing pillars of consultancy, management and technology so that companies function with an operational ease. Not only do they help companies in adopting the cloud, but also help them in managing and maintaining it [5]. They will help in migrating the company's data to the provider that suits the needs better, in the due course of maintenance [22] [28]. The contribution of this paper can be summarized as follows: 1. Classification of CSBs 2. Analysis that defines a CSB, its roles, functions, and benefits 3. A method for selecting a CSB The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II outlines related work in this area. Section III provides a classification of CSBs and studies the functionality and utility of a CSB. Section IV demonstrates a mechanism to select a CSB from a pool prevailing in the market.

1530-1362/13 $31.00 © 2013 IEEE DOI 10.1109/APSEC.2013.129

RELATED WORK

There is a growing interest in both, the Technical and business aspects of a CSB[51]. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) anticipates a need of intermediaries between consumers and providers. Liu et al [26] defines a cloud broker, and describes its role in NIST Cloud Computing reference architecture. Somashekar, Sam [27] explains how a cloud broker surveys cloud providers to estimate and compare their capabilities, liabilities, business models and costs. Buyya et al[1] provides a high level architecture of a Cloud Broker Service encompassing the various services it provides in a hypothetical federated Cloud Computing environment. Pawluk et al[2] gives the design and implementation of a cloud broker service for cooperative cross cloud usage, and puts the implementation to test. [3,9] published by CSBs give an overview of the logical model, core concepts, communication architecture, and common broker patterns. Past research works have also explored the utilities that a CSB can provide. Somashekar, Sam [27] has defined a cloud broker as a special instance of a service procurer, which creates and maintains relationships with multiple cloud providers. Some obvious functionalities of a cloud broker include consolidated billing, seamless switching between providers and monitoring. Liu et al[26] defines a cloud broker as an entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between Cloud Providers and Cloud Consumer. It categorizes the services of a cloud broker as service intermediation, aggregation and arbitrage. By service intermediation, a cloud broker enhances a given service by improving some specific capability and providing some value added services to the consumer. By service aggregation, a cloud broker combines and integrates multiple services into one or more services. By service arbitrage it integrates services that are not fixed, and allows flexibility to choose from multiple providers. Pawluk, et al [2] enumerates various approaches by means of which a cloud broker can ensure interoperability between multiple providers. Grivas et al[6] focuses cloud broker’s role in handling the change management of business processes. Nair et al[7] proposes how a cloud broker ensures data security . Buyya et al[8] describes the role of a cloud broker in creation and maintenance of an SLA (Service Level Agreement). We observe that various business and technical issues of CSBs are being addressed through such research works. However, we don’t find any consolidated view of CSB’s role or a method that facilitates the selection of a CSB. In this paper, we attempt to fill these gaps.

Keywords- CSB,cloud broker,utility, Aggregation, Migration, Integration

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Bharti Suri University School of Information and Communication Technology GGSIPU, New Delhi, India [email protected]

Aditi Jaitly Faculty of Management Studies University of Delhi New Delhi, India [email protected]

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Aggregator Integrator

TABLE I. PRIMARY ROLES, CLOUD SERVICE BROKERS BlueWolf, Ingram Micro Cloud, SynnexCloudSolv, Tech Data TDCloud, HP- Aggregation Platform for SaaS, ComputeNext, Infogain, CloudCompare, Cloud Nation, CompatibleOne, Appirio, CloudSherpas, NephosTechnologies, Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace*, AWS Marketplace*, ComcastUpware*,SaaSMax* Appirio, Dell Boomi, CloudSherpas, Liason Technologies, Cordys, Gravitant, GXS Trading Grid, Cloud Ecosystem Hub

Governance

Gravitant, Vordel, Infosys Cloud Services, SinglePoint

Customiser

Appirio, CloudSherpas, Infosys Cloud Services, Compatibleone * Essentially an online store that provides background information about third party cloud services and links to pertinent third party websites for potential purchasing opportunities

2) Integrator- Technically skilled, this type of provider merges services from an assortment of cloud providers to create a net new business process [23]. 3) Governance Services- This is especially important in highly regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, where protection of consumer data is essential. Here, the broker ensures that the cloud service provider treats the data in accordance with the regulations and policies, and that security practices are adhered to [23].It will handle the basic administrative tasks of the system. 4) Customizer- As the name suggests, customizers will create extensions to existing cloud services for a specific functionality and then ensure that the extensions work properly [23]. It will alter its functionality to the needs of the consumer. In Table 2, we have classified each utility as Business and/or Technical utility. In Table 3, we have classified CSB based on each of the above roles. A CSB provides utilities both for the consumer and the provider, where ES stands for Extra Service, while NS stands for Not Specified. Let, Set A= {Un|1